Well, February marked another drop in earnings. Again, the earnings drop can mainly be attributed to a drop in the rankings. The drop in February had more of an impact on the earnings.

It isn’t clear exactly why the rankings dropped but my hunch is that a number of sites in the tiered linking structure were removed. I do have a full action plan in progress right now…

Here are the February earnings…

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Amazon Screenshot

Overall Earnings by Month

Cumulative Earnings by Month

Earnings Summary in Table Form

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Why the HUGE drop in earnings?

Good question. Well, the drop in earnings is directly related to the traffic decline. The traffic decline is related to the rankings drop in January and February.

I can’t say for sure why the rankings dropped. Initially, it seemed like my anchor text distribution was high for my target keywords. It is about 12%. However, when you look at other sites in the niche, my website was well within the range that my competition was in. It is possible that the anchor text is an issue but it is unlikely.

As I mentioned above, the most likely candidate for the drop is losing backlinks. Every now and then, web 2.0 free blogs are removed or deleted for inactivity. Considering that I have not logged into any of the web 2.0s in months, that is highly possible.

Do your methods still work?

Yes, absolutely. I can confidently say that because I have another site that is ranking and making money as well. In fact, the new website surpassed the site above in February. 🙂 I used the same methods, processes, and link building strategies as the site above.

I haven’t shared any of the earnings for the other site…let’s call it site #2. Overall, it’s doing well and it proves that even a new site can rank with the process.

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In addition, there are a few people that I coached over the last couple months. I have witnessed success by others using the processes too. It’s pretty awesome to see others find success too!

Refocusing…

One of the reasons for the drop in rankings is a lack of focus. It happens. The website was on autopilot…

I didn’t add any new content.

I didn’t add any new backlinks.

I was working on the book, exploring the world of PBNs, and some other things in the offline world were happening. I have refocused and have a game plan for getting the site on track again.

I am happy to have a path forward with next steps.

I need your help…

There are many blogs that publish full income reports. Is that something that you are interested in for this website?

Of course, I have been tracking the initial money site since last fall as you can see from this article.

Would tracking individual money sites (just like in this post) be less interesting than the full reports? I talked with some of my trusted advisors recently (thanks guys! you know who you are) and they reminded me how inspiring income reports can be.

If you want to see income reports of some kind, just let me know in the comments below. I value your input.

I like seeing income reports like this. I also like you gave reasons for the drop or increases, as well as your actions that will cause some correction. If you do get a huge increase in sales after you add more content and backlinks, it would be interesting to get numbers on average needed content per month to keep stable sales up, or even what backlinking methods will grow or hurt sales.

Either way, love the site and the community of niche site builders out there right now. Keep up the great work!

Your positive outlook on everything is very inspiring and infectious. That was one of the first things that I noticed on Spencer’s podcast and throughout your site. Keep up the hard work and I’m sure you will continue seeing much success! I’m going to do the same :).

Hello Doug, You provide nice informations and like you I’m trying to monetize my website from scratch with advices that I can find on blogs like yours or others. When I visit blogs like yours, I want transparency and I want to see evolution. Why? Because this a relation win/win. You can say I earn money with my blog (and do not show the result), show beautiful graphics (I mean fake) but I’m not sure to trust you. If I don’t trust you I leave. But with the result and the graphics, to be honest THAT’S KICK MY ASS 😉 and give more motivations to do the same. I hope you understand what I trying to say. Anyway, keep going, like your blog

Hi Doug! I’m very interested to see the full reports, and I mean the “Pat Flynn Way”, where he shows exactly in which categories he earns or expends money. Whenever I read his full income reports, I feel very inspired and that pushes me to be an action taker 🙂 Cheers from Italy, Ago

Congrats on the awesome results doug – glad to see that even though one of your sites went down you’re still making money. Like the others, im really interested to see the full income (and expense) reports. It would help a lot to for me so that I can see if i’m within the expense range as everyone else, as I still havent seen much income yet.

Hi Doug, I have seen some evergreen keywords, or shall we say not spiking sales on December ONLY based on its previous data … its climbing upward ever since .. but not sure yet if its graph will match its sales and earnings … since i know that some of the graphs based on public niches reports are not really bringing big income like yours especially in December ..

Inspiring to see such great results. I am starting to make some niche sites and have had minimal sales – but it’s also the summer and hoping that things pick up in the fall when people start to shop for the fall/winter holidays.